King Rex Milestone Reached, What Makes a Good Sequel? and French Absurdity

Hello! Hope you’re well.

The year is well and truly underway, and we’re within sight of Easter already. The plan ahead for this newsletter is to share a mix of behind the scenes progress, recommendations, things I’m looking forward to, inspiration, and other illustration/storytelling/cartooning projects I’m beavering away at in the margins.

I’m looking to expand creatively and see where it leads, so I hope you’ll join me, spread the word and all that. Do get in touch and say hello.

King Rex Book 2 Update

I reached a milestone this week: final pencils on the story are complete! This is a big step, and it’s very satisfying to finally get this far.

But where does this sit in the big picture? Let’s go to the cutting edge of technical widgetery to find out:

It’s gratifying to think I’m over halfway through now - in reality developing the story takes far longer than the chart shows, as it takes time to explore the options, go down idea rabbit holes, backtrack and trim, remove bits, follow where it wants to go and rediscover what it’s actually about. Now the exploration stage is over, so it’s more about getting through. 16 pages of inks are next, so I hope to do that over the next month. Momentum!

It would have been easy to create a follow up to the Cough Medicine Mission which followed a similar path: but I knew these characters and this world had so much more scope and many more adventures to come. There’s a balance to sequels where there needs to be just enough the same that an audience will enjoy the familiarity, but enough that’s new so that it develops in new ways and doesn’t feel like a retread. But also not so different it spoils what people loved about the first one.

It goes along with this quote from David Bowie on creativity:

Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.

Which is what I’m hoping for with King Rex; stretch, expand, develop the world and characters, but stay true to their essence.

The Minefield of Creating Sequels

This got me thinking about sequels, and why they work well or not so well.

So here’s some first instalments and sequels that get it right and develop in a way that is both familiar and new:

• Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back: it’s all about the characters.

• The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (books): tone shifts from the storybook Hobbit to epic myth.

• The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers (films): follow familiar characters as the world expands.

• John Wick, John Wick 2: the already stylised world gets more heightened and mythical as the series goes on. (Actually I don’t remember John Wick 2, but I like where the world ended up, so there’s a point about taking what works from the original and expanding on that).

And ones I think didn’t get it right (you may think differently and that’s OK):

• The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy: the central relationship which gave the first movie heart is killed. Introduction of shaky cam is copied by action movies until John Wick makes being able to see the action cool again.

• The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi: it seems every question set up and potential payoff promised in the first don’t go anywhere. There’s a side quest where a main character saves space horses. He then tries to make the ultimate heroic sacrifice to save the rebels, but is thwarted by his own friend, thus killing more rebels, so there doesn’t seem to be much point to him being in the movie. There’s a potentially amazing plot twist which would blow the storytelling possibilities wide open into new exciting horizons - Rey could join Kylo Ren and become a villain - but… the door is closed on that and she’s still good. It simultaneously tries to be different, but doesn’t want to follow up on the organic story potential in a way that’s true to the world, or respects its characters. Where are the story or characters leading you? Storytelling isn’t about dictating what you want to the story, it’s more like gardening. Characters should begin to write themselves. Personally, I think it tries too hard. The director has made very good movies, but in a murder mystery genre which plays to his strengths.

• Speed and Speed 2: rehashing the first because money, but changing one of the lead characters and putting a bomb on a massive cruise ship in a spacious ocean is not the best choice for tension in movie build upon… well, speed. (Now set it on a bullet train, and you’re onto something…)

Now I think about it, there’s movie series that go a different way, and it works:

• Captain America, The Winter Soldier: wildly different tone which improves upon the first, but the core of the character remains the same: it’s all about how he acts in a changed world. Will he stay true or change with the times? A thread that gets pushed to extremes with Civil War.

• The Mission Impossible series: the first films were deliberately different tonally - espionage, action, action thriller - then the series found it’s unique footing; Ethan Hunt needs his team more, the tech goes wrong, there’s humour and the real stunts get more extreme (it’s just a shame one of the best characters was written out.)

Then there’s the trilogies where the second part is either OK or not as good, but the third dials it in and gets back to what works, but ramps up the storytelling to a grand conclusion (until Hollywood goes back for more):

• The Bourne Ultimatum: that’s better, phew.

• The Dark Knight Rises: (personal preference - I did not like the Dark Knight).

• Die Hard With a Vengeance: terrorists across a whole city, villain with a link to the first movie.

So from what I can tell, the characters need to develop and the world grow, and new ideas be explored. The tone can change, but to do that the characters need to stay true to the essence of what people were drawn to initially. And you have to care for them, as people spend time with characters, but won’t look back fondly on plot intricacies.

And if you seed a mystery or question in the first part, then for the audience’s sake pay it off satisfyingly (I wish the Star Wars sequels had gone down a different path) or just open another mystery box without knowing your destination (I’m looking at you, Lost).

Crumbs, sequels are hard to pull off well.

Which are your favourite sequels (or least favourite), and why do they work (or not)?

An Asterix Series!

Asterix is one of my earliest influences, and imprinted itself on me when I was knee high to a grasshopper. The recent movies have brought the comic to life, and the live action movies have done so with an absurdist wit: ridiculous dialogue, puns and situations build across a scene, layering into a wonderful French Monty Pythonesque nonsense, in the best possible sense. So this new animated series is top of my watch list, and looks like to captures the essence of the comic:

The more recent Asterix movies remind me of Tim Vine comedy - the jokes come thick and fast, so you’re barely able to laugh at one joke before you’re laughing at the next one.

Anyway, time to get on. Cheerio!